London is not a good place for fans of right angles. People who like the methodical grid system of Manhattan will whimper and cry at the baffling knot of streets of England’s capital. In this bewildering network, it’s entirely possible to take two right turns and end up in the same place. Or in Narnia. Even with a map, some people manage to get lost. And yet, there are thousands of Londoners who have committed the city’s entire layout to memory – cab drivers.

Piloting London’s distinctive black cabs (taxis to everyone else) is no easy feat. To earn the privilege, drivers have to pass an intense intellectual ordeal, known charmingly as The Knowledge. Ever since 1865, they’ve had to memorise the location of every street within six miles of Charing Cross – all 25,000 of the capital’s arteries, veins and capillaries. They also need to know the locations of 20,000 landmarks – museums, police stations, theatres, clubs, and more – and 320 routes that connect everything up.

It can take two to four years to learn everything. To prove their skills, prospective drivers make “appearances” at the licencing office, where they have to recite the best route between any two points. The only map they can use is the one in their head. They even have to narrate the details of their journey, complete with passed landmarks, road names, junctions, turns and maybe even traffic lights. Only after successfully doing this, several times over, can they earn a cab driver’s licence.

Given how hard it is, it shouldn’t be surprising that The Knowledge changes the brains of those who acquire it. And for the last 11 years, Eleanor Maguire from University College London has been studying those changes.

In 2000, Maguire showed that one particular part of the brain – the hippocampus – is much larger in London cab drivers than in other people. This seahorse-shaped area lies in the core of the brain, and animal studies had linked it to memory and spatial awareness. Species that store a lot of food tend to have a bigger hippocampus than those without the need to remember any burial sites.

Maguire showed that the same applies to humans. Not only did cab drivers have an unusually large hippocampus, but the size of the area matched the length of their driving careers. Since then, taxi drivers have featured in many of Maguire’s experiments. “They know that they’re special,” she says.”What they’ve achieved when they’re qualified is extremely impressive, so they’re very willing to come and be tested.”

An enlarged hippocampus is a rare feature. You don’t see it in doctors who gain vast amounts of knowledge over many years. You don’t see it in memory champions who have trained themselves to remember seemingly impossible lists. You don’t see it in London’s bus drivers who have similar driving skills but work along fixed routes. Among all of these groups, only the London cabbies, with their superb spatial memories, have swollen hippocampi.

These studies strongly suggested that their intensive training was the reason for the changes in the taxi drivers’ brains. They helped to change the decades-old perception of the adult brain as a static organ. Instead, Maguire likens the brain to a muscle – exercise it and it gets stronger. “But of course,” she says, “the real test is to take people before they start training and test them afterwards, to see if there are changes in the hippocampus in the same individual. That would give the best evidence.”

Maguire, and her colleague Katherine Woollett, have done exactly that. They scanned their brains of 79 wannabe drivers who had just started their training. Three to four years later, they did the same thing. By this point, 39 of the trainees – just under half – had earned their licence. The rest had flunked out. The Knowledge is not easily won.

At the start of the study, the trainees had the same memory skills as each other, and 31 men with no aspirations of being cabbies. Everyone’s hippocampus was on a similarly level playing field. The second time round, things had changed. Woollett and Maguire found that the hippocampi of the qualified cabbies had grown in size, especially the back part. They were now significantly larger than those of either the failed trainees or the men who didn’t take part. The cabbies also outperformed their peers on spatial memory tasks.

This is the strongest evidence yet that the training that London cabbies undergo is directly responsible for the changes in their brain. The alternative – that someone with a large hippocampus is more likely to drive a taxi – just doesn’t hold.

Still, there are some unanswered questions. For a start, how exactly does studying for The Knowledge increase the rise of the hippocampus? This small area is one of only two parts of the brain that makes new neurons throughout our adult lives. These extra cells could account for the increased size of a cabbie’s hippocampus. Alternatively, the existing neurons could simply form better connections with one another. Maguire’s next challenge is to tease apart these possibilities.

Another question: why did half of the trainees fail to qualify? Most of them said that they couldn’t afford the time or money, while others cited family obligations. Those could all be valid reasons, but equally, they could be smokescreens that cover a deeper inability. Maguire wonders if genetic differences could give some people a natural edge and others a natural weakness, especially since some genes do affect the size of the hippocampus.

For the moment, Maguire thinks that her work on cab drivers has implications for everyone. “We’re in a situation where people are living longer and often have to retrain or re-educate themselves at various phases in their lives,” she says. “It’s important for people to know that their brains can support that. It’s not the case that your brain structure is fixed.”

She also wonders if her work could one day help people with memory problems, a group that she identifies with. “I’m grossly impaired. I can’t step outside my office without guidance. I keep on having to be talked into places by phone.” She laughs. “It’s very ironic. I’m very motivated to learn how the brain helps you navigate!”

There are 15 Comments. Add Yours.

Simon K
December 8, 2011

An interesting series of studies, but a slightly sloppy headline by your standards, Ed. While undoubtedly true, it’s spectacularly unspecific.

You could equally well say “reading Not Exactly Rocket Science changes the brains of Internet users”. In my case, my brain is changed so that it now (in ways that neuroscience has yet to fully elucidate) contains the information that the brains of London cabbies have an enlarged hippocampus. In the same way, there’s no arguing with Professor Susan Greenfield when she says that children’s brains are changed by playing video games. If nothing else, they are usually changed to make them better at playing video games!

What’s noteworthy here is not just that the cabbies’ brains are changed – which surely happens to every one of us every minute of every day – but that they are so profoundly changed in relatively easily measurable ways.

Ed Yong
December 8, 2011

It’s a fair cop. I actually debated about that with myself but opted for the version that didn’t have the word “hippocampus” in it. Couldn’t find a way to make the headline short, punchy and yet understandable to lay readers.

Actually, as I type this, I realise that adding a “How” at the front would help matters, so I will.

ren
December 8, 2011

just FYI, very important typo in the third to last paragraph: the word should be ‘genetic’ not ‘generic’ “Maguire wonders if genetic differences…”

It seems SVZ is not a source for new neurons in adult humans, like it is in rodents and, to a lesser degree, non-human primates. That leaves us with only the dentate gyrus as a possibility!

Ed Yong
December 8, 2011

Cheers Noah. That’s very useful to know.

Hershel Layton
December 9, 2011

I wonder whether the changes to the brain may have negative effects. This isn’t my field of expertise, of course.

Ed Yong
December 9, 2011

@Hershel – Yes. From the post: “The Knowledge comes at a cost – taxi drivers find it more difficult to integrate new routes into their existing maps, and other aspects of their memory seemed to suffer.”

ben
December 9, 2011

At the end of the article Ms. Maguire points out the irony that she cannot navigate herself out of the proverbial wet paper bag, yet has devoted her career to understanding how other people manage… and it occurs to me that there are worse ways to spend a life than working out a better answer for “Why?” than “Because.”

James Lloyd
December 9, 2011

Awesome summary. I wish there was a Narnia in London!

Harrow
December 9, 2011

“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth, a compositor by his left thumb, or a London cabbie by his enlarged hippocampus, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!” –Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, 1892

-Harrow.

Zen Faulkes
December 9, 2011

On a related note, it’s not just spatial learning that increases hippocampal volume. Aerobic exercise can do that, too:

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